todo

pocket / keychain calipers? that would be an interesting design challenge (is it even possible)

todo: create public wiki, anyone can login with certificates and edit (for use for hosting class websites etc.).

todo: submit a good post to MIT writing center for critique http://writing.mit.edu/wcc/online-consultant

Sometimes I feel like 2.007 wants us to violate this. http://www.societyofrobots.com/robot_tutorial.shtml Yea, we're MIT students, but we're also just like any other human being who has never built a robot before:

• Don't reinvent the wheel! Search the web for how other people did things, and copy them! It may be unoriginal, but hey it is your first robot, don't expect to develop the theory of relativity on your first try.

"We want to break the graph where time experiences insane ramp-up during last three weeks" -- well, uh, look at the calendar. What times are majority robot-building, and what times are filled with hand-holding Milestones and homeworks and such? Maybe I'll come to realize their usefulness, but I would like to build my first robot, get it to work, and then run calculations and iterate on the design. (aka, I don't want to do homework and I want to get credit for doing things I like doing in my spare time anyway, heh).

send techcash to fellow students. daily recipes

TechCash: almost everyone at MIT has it. Should be able to pay each other TechCash online. That way, can pay exact amounts (no more splitting a pizza and realizing everyone has twenties)

[Edit 2 Feb 2011]
I sent an email.
Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 3:58 AM
Feature req: send techcash to fellow MIT students
reciever: techcash

It would be very convenient if we could send techcash to fellow MIT students, ideally with low or no transaction costs. Almost everyone uses TechCash, and this could be an awesome solution to the ubiquitous "Well, we bought a pizza, but everyone only has $20 bills" problem. 

Further down the road, an API for Tech Cash would be amazing, although I have no idea how security and everything would work, and whether it's silly to have PayPal but for MIT.If such a feature is in the works, please let me know.

Well, mitcard responded that they're exploring these ideas with the TechCash vendor. They've also explored an API for years but found the cost prohibitive. Ah well.

Next step for me: http://web.mit.edu/mitcard/techcash/DLC%20Memo.pdf

[/edit]

Medical / S^3 / Health:
Should have recipe(s) of the day, or weekly groceries. So people like me who are too lazy to pick food don't have to think too much and I can cook with a group of friends and eat. Provide telephone support (or forum? like woot? or chat) so people can ask question about modifying the recipe.

(sell daily cooking "kits" with fresh ingredients and fruit? contract with local farms?)

ohloh: should have more features, because I'm not interested in donating toward many open-source projects now, but it would be cool to see how much developers are asking for, and then when I am no longer a student, or if I make money using their software, I can see. Also, it'd be cool to see an average of self-reported earnings using open-source software (perhaps excluding things like apache? maybe just targeted at small-business?).

This could help persuade the Small Business government people to subsidize open-source software development, although it has to be done carefully to make sure it doesn't drag around the focuses of open source software unduly. Then people wouldn't try to charge money for really useful features, because no matter if they spent a large amount of time on it, I'm not going to pay for it if I'm trying to bootstrap myself, and I'm forced to reinvent the wheel. I would, however, be willing to pay for modules if eventually I make money (?).

Kind of like the whole subsidizing fertilizer versus vouchers or lending credit which simply shifts the burden to when they have money (right after harvest) instead of when they likely have a lot less money (right before planting).

Tegaki: chinese handwriting recognition on ubuntu maverick [meerkat 10.10]

In short, in a terminal, type in:

sudo apt-get install ibus-tegaki
sudo apt-get tegaki-zinnia-simplified-chinese

Pinyin / keyboard-based Chinese IME works well enough in Ubuntu, but tablet recognition is iffy.

The tegaki 0.3.1 packages are already in the meerkat universe repositories. (ibus-tegaki, tegaki-zinnia-simplified-chinese), so it's super straightforward.

(if when you type in above the terminal says "can't find package", you need to enable to universe repositories. Via command line: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/CommandLine. Via GUI: go to [Applications > Ubuntu Software Center > Edit > Software Sources] and make sure that "universe" is checked.

Maybe you also need to install libzinnia0, not sure.

Yay, that's it! If you need to, start the Ibus daemon. [System > Preferences > Keyboard Input Methods] should prompt you to start the daemon if you haven't already. Then go to [Input Method > Select an Input Method... > Other > tegaki] and hit [Add].
You can also try [... > Chinese > Pinyin]  and hit [Add]. Note that that's a capital-P! "pinyin" is for typing the tone marks.

Now you can select "tegaki" as an Ibus input method like normal (by clicking the keyboard ibus icon in the notication area), and I think the default keyboard shortcuts are [left-alt + shift] for switching inputs and [ctrl-space] for turning Input Methods on and off.

Tegaki does some weird hogging-the-input on my computer sometimes, though, and I can't even turn it off via IBus>Restart. I have to go ps x | grep ibus, sudo kill -9 [process #], ibus-daemon (to restart ibus), which is silly.

I can't get the wagomu engine to install though. :/ grr it keeps saying "can't find wagomu.h"

Also, ibus and tegaki are teh fails compared to Vista [Business and Up]'s Tablet PC Input Panel recognition. Tegaki is unsuitable for my give-tablet-to-grandma project. Sometimes it works beautifully, but my dad and I spent 15 minutes trying to write "那" before we gave up. Also, there's no way to enter in pinyin to shore up the recognition fail, and there's no way to easily enter English characters. There's no way I'm going to tell my grandma "Then you go down to this corner here and click and pick English handwriting recognition."

I was puzzling over this and then I used Vista Biz's tablet pc UI and it did address all of these issues (of course, some issues are obviated because its handwriting recognition feature is, for the most part, accurate, so there's no need for a back-one-stroke in addition to a back-entire-strokes and delete-all-characters-I've-approved-but-not-yet-inserted = 3 delete buttons).

Of course, this means I should haxor on the tegaki code, but ?? I have no idea where to get started and wish I could just skype with the developer for 30 minutes. I bet that would save me 20 hours of confusion.

Also to consider:

• Running Vista Business in a VM inside Ubuntu (if I can find or order the restore media), writing code to access its input panel technology
• Plunking down 40 euros for http://www.visionobjects.com/en/webstore/buy-myscript-stylus

Alternatively, I could keep spamming my living group's mailing list and hope someone's interested enough to tackle this with me, or start spamming SIPB's mailing list

Also, my ssh is still more broken than not so I can't even anti-social-tastically whine on Zephyr and keep my daily realization that I hate computers from polluting the internets.

Useful command line of the day:

apt-cache search [search term]

e.g.

apt-cache search tegaki

Also,
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UsingTheTerminal

Profs should learn customer support best practices to help students || post-in-progress

you know what frustrates me about the way stellar and professors and TAs handle questions?
I feel like they don't implement Customer Support best practices. :P "Create an FAQ". (http://dylanwilbanks.com/blog/2010/07/30/this-is-my-truth-tell-me-yours/)
Really, that's what it boils down to. "why are you answering questions individually instead of..." "why does no one use the forums" ...
I think this should be a crucial issue for Stellar.

Of course, I really respect my professors and TAs and they were all super-awesome and superhumanly patient with me.

|| this is a post-in-progress || to do: add links ||

[ctrl-shift-c]: chrome "inspect element" versus gnome terminal "paste" rant

Merry Christmas all! :)

I've been having a lot of fun doing all the things I wanted to do during the semester, but didn't have time to (thanks MIT). Unfortunately, this isn't "developing girl crushes" or "playing more games" or "watching TV" or even "hanging out with friends IRL." It's been "let's learn drupal, and certificates, and try to understand fourier transforms, and not fail classes next semester [:/ this is already starting to stress me out], and learn Chinese, and hang out with my family." Now there's only a week of Winter Break left before I head back to MIT and do Everything Ever during IAP. O__o;

Mrmm. Maybe there's something wrong with me. Oh well! :D


[rant follows]
Anyway, I wanted to say, WHY? Why is Chrome's "inspect element" keyboard shortcut set to [ctrl-shift-c] and, more importantly, why can't I change it? 

GNOME terminal uses [ctrl-shift-c] as the shortcut for copying (because [ctrl-c] isn't paste but rather "quit this thing right NOW") so I'm in the terrible habit of always hitting both by default now. But then I'm pasting code from Chrome and this "Inspect Element" thing comes up and eats an inch out of my 5 vertical inches of screen-space and now I've got this weird blue box following me around and my netbook is like "uhm what no haz processing power" and I'm like "aughhh I just wanted to copy something" and then I escape out of Inspect Element (hint: hit [ctrl-shift-c] again) and I try to [ctrl-shift-v] in terminal and it turns out that in the midst of fighting with Chrome, I'd totally forgotten about hitting [ctrl-c] as well. So nothing copies. Except now I go back and there's a good chance that since I just hit [ctrl-shift-v] in terminal, now I'm going to try to hit [ctrl-shift-c] in Chrome, AGAIN.

Also, however Chrome is integrating flash [video], it fails mightily compared to FF. I can run vimeo movies without skip in FF but not so for Chrome.

FF does seem slow on most pages compared to Chrome though, but that may be because of the 800 plugins I have installed.

Also, the download bar in Chrome is useful, but can't they have an "autohide" or "slide out" option? because it eats up 10% of my vertical screen space. It's like viewing the world through blinders.
[Edit 1/10/10: So it turns out there's an "x" all the way to the right that I missed due to having electrical tape covering that side of my screen]
Actually, I'd love it if the address bar only came up when I hit [ctrl-l] because I have everything else at my fingertips [ctrl-left arrow / right arrow], [ctrl-r] except for the delicious "tag" button (speaking of which, that's a rant for another time). Also, I'm forced to use the "system title bar" to have a good idea of what page I'm on (consider when I'm looking up answers on Ubuntu Forums and have 20 tabs open from that site... the favicons don't really help me distinguish pages). That bar eats up another 5% of vertical screen space, which is rather unfortunate.


Lately there's been these weird glitches, I think in both FF and Chrome, where the system title bar displays a page title for a page that I'm not on. Not sure if it's an effect of having 6000 tabs open, but I hadn't noticed it before a week ago.

useful bash / vi commands

it's always fun to realize your ghetto workarounds were obsolete decades ago.

Instead of Tomboy > Ctrl-D "insert timestamp"
Try bash ~$ date

Instead of converting

fooemail
email2
email3

to

fooemail, email2, email3 

by hand (end, delete, ctrl-arrow, space, delete, ...), try

~$ vi emails.txt
[shift-j][.][.]

Also, "watch" for monitoring terminal (to your monitor) outputs instead of "tail -f" for monitoring file outputs

And [!] for accessing [history] commands by their number, and the [up-arrow] for previous commands

Also, ever tried to copy-paste a pdf table? (e.g. the innumerable schedules that professors think Must Be In PDF and put up on Stellar =/ has anyone heard of HTML? For the most part it's just as standardized and accessible and I don't end up with 600 files, 200 duplicates scattered my filesystem). It fails miserably, but again vi comes to the rescue, easily.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2923570/vim-step-by-step-how-do-you-line-up-arbitrary-text-by-arbitrary-delimiter/2923916#2923916

technology review

bad: stacks of technology review, at EC desk, unread
better: keep a dozen for EC people to peruse and return after read, donate the rest to schools / other deserving people (parents? have the option to pay a bit and have it shipped to parents?)

I don't know why we all get free copies of technology review, but really, you only need a dozen per dorm or thereabouts, not 500. It's wasteful.

PDFs need: image "links" where you can hover over the link and there'll be a lightbox (or popup? O.o because need zooming buttons) of the image. Useful for lecture notes when they refer to images on say the previous page, where even "view> dual" doesn't work

Also / alternatively, a "view>dual" on pdf readers that let's you choose how the 2-pages-views are split (this working whether you're "view>continuous" or not is optional), e.g. create (2page) from
(1,2) (3,4) ..
OR
(2,3) (4,5) ...

Ubuntu still needs a tabbed pdf reader...

zephyr needs: 

persistence between logins (provided by screen right now) (logs aren't really the solution)

a GUI (people are working on webzephyr)

integration with stellar (for logs for classes)

grooveshark ui thoughts

grooveshark seems to time out faster with the update

i wish they would give a small audio beep-beep 10 seconds before stopping the music and asking me to hit "resume, so instead of the music stopping entirely I can switch over quickly, hit a "i'm still here" button, and the music never stops flowing.

right now, like with pandora ads, i only really notice grooveshark when I'm annoyed by its asking me to hit resume

twitter for peer discovery, 6.005

why I wish I was able to exhale code:
using twitter instead of udp for peer discovery (why do you need a server? just playing antib over twitter)
cracking the hash -- use rainbow tables? hmm. how did they do it?? can we do it better? mmm. can i just join their team temporarily to work on their AI? lol.

[edit dec 7 2010] asuther suggested the twitter idea, after I ran into the lounge and explained how "everything must twitter" was fulfilled by a 6.005 team that had a working twitter button in their game
and hash cracking is a natural route for AI because of the very weak security system we're using (no salts, very low key entropy)

Stellar thoughts

Features I would like:

some way to "sync" to the Materials or Homework sections, so that I automatically get new psets.

a forum that people used, or some way to find people willing to pset around the same time / place (that... that sounds like a smart phone app sort of thing, actually. But I don't have a smart phone >.>)

It sounds like they're changing the backend for Stellar NG and not so much the front-end.
https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/STLRNG/Home

Itches (things that I want to make when I'm competent and not hosed) : Calendars, DIYbio, Email for Elderly

Itches I would like scratched / will scratch myself once I both (a) can code and (b) have time:
(above disclaimer added since I don't want to be one of those "I have this cool idea please code it for me" business people...)

Events for MIT: events.mit.edu is good but not comprehensive. Instead, I have to manually create a Google calendar entry for each event that gets mailed to me (Autosuggest often doesn't pick up on these emails, for some reason). I think a solution specific to MIT would be used by a lot of people (e.g. Gcal seems confused by our completely-number-based rooms). Some way of mailing events, or some sort of "event ical link" so that I could one-click add them to my calendar would be nice.
Some merging of the calendar feature of Noontime Networks and classmates.mit.edu would be ideal.

Noontime Networks: (a) automatically grabs Stellar calendar information, and (b) lets users share calendars they've created with each other. However, you have to sign-in to access these, and almost everyone on there is a Sloan grad student.

(b) is important because many classes don't have a Stellar calendar, so I have to create my own (e.g. from the syllabus)

Classmates.mit.edu: Existed for one semester, never maintained. Nice idea.


International Email for Elderly:
Because I shouldn't need to teach my grandma how to use Gmail to get an email client in Chinese. She really does not need to know about labels, and the interface is non-intuitive for someone who's not familiar with computers / email. Alice (my best friend) drew a cartoon instruction manual and it's still confusing for her, and I can't explain this long-distance (Boston is a bit chilly for her to move up here =] ).

There are (non-free, non-open-source) email programs for the elderly already, but they're all in English (and being non-open-source, I can't translate them).

Also, keyboards are such fail. Why are there so many different arrows on the keyboard? Why is it difficult to find keyboard translations? (Google Images, I don't want images of super-special keyboards, I want images of normal keyboards sold in China, with backspace and other key names translated, not with weird labels all over the keys).

Right, that's why I want a tablet. **

In addition, I hope that there's good open source tablet software for Chinese character recognition. I did try one variant once a few months ago and didn't find it easy to use (it was an ibus input method, ibus-handwrite). I was trying it out on my netbook, and the input rectangle was awkwardly located right on top of my bottom panel, so that I couldn't reach the ibus icon to turn it off the way I normally do.

Speaking of which, eclectus is an awesome Chinese dictionary tool (it has integrated handwriting recognition, so it's not an input method but inside eclectus you can write words and search for them).

And laoshi looks very promising, although all the example lessons were in traditional Chinese (and they were for beginners). Of course, the goal of Laoshi is that you can make your own lessons.
Eek, I just checked the Laoshi website and looks like it hasn't been touched since the summer. I hope it's still being worked on.

Things that I want to make:
cereal dispenser - for putz breakfast co-op -- this could actually be a nice straightforward weekend project to learn more machining with

hot glue molded  lego gummis, (hot glue is nontoxic, right? Or I could go the Jello mold route. Hmm.) -- kept putting this off because the instructables called for food-grade silicon, and I have this aversion to spending money for some reason >___<;;
 I'm also reluctant to take working (even if obsolete) things apart. This... this creates issues for building things. Seriously, op-amps cost $5. I should simply buy some. (special low-power op-amps, common ones (like LM786 I believe) can be found at MITERS).

weld a breakfast cart?

touch tablet? / email in international languages, calendar for MIT... crowdsourcing of gcal, or email of events) **

isolate bioluminescent bacteria from squid* (who doesn't want a vat of glowing bacteria? =) I want to streak plates and get messages, like bio-art. See http://www.curbmedia.com/what-we-do-glowfungi.asp) (also see Mario bio-art! http://www.microbialart.com/galleries/igem-team-osaka/)


* I tried about 2 weeks ago, didn't get any glowing bacteria. Bad squid / wrong kind / not fresh enough, or too high saline content (I had it about 1.5x sea salt content by accident). Or perhaps there was glowing bacteria, I just needed to let my eyes adjust more. http://has100ideas.com/idea/culturing-bioluminescent-microbes-part-1 (also in Boston) (he's not responsive to email).
Apparently the easier / more rigorous way to go is to find people who know where to order Vibrio directly, but then it's no longer highly accessible to anyone with a kitchen.

Also, missed the DIYbio meetup at Sprout because I was hosed :( I didn't even volunteer at the last Swapfest (the MITERS frosh seem to have it handled, though. Also, the MITERS frosh are awesome this year and make me even more aware of my incompetence).

**Well, tablet was solved with iPad / netbook tablets. (Now that the price for a netbook tablet is under $300, I might just buy one instead of hacking my own by backward-hinging a netbook and a digitizer) (I want it for grandma, but I would be tempted to use it for myself instead >____>)


Punted learning:
Drawing
Blender
Chinese
Spanish
Arabic
Urdu / Hindi (same thing! >__>)
everything in the world ever
machining
how to be awesome / not incompetent / not hosed



Augh, I should stop punting 24.900 (which, by the way, is an awesome class which involves a lot of doing your own fieldwork by studying a friend who speaks a foreign language natively =] ).
(It's Intro to Linguistics)